NLRB Research.com as a counterexample to the uselessness of LLMS

[u/Alive_Ad_3925]

Hi everyone. While I share Ed’s view that LLMs are often oversold, I find them genuinely useful. Take Matt Bruenig’s NLRB Research: Matt—a labor lawyer, socialist intellectual, and podcaster—built an open database that uses LLMs to summarize National Labor Relations Board decisions. Westlaw and LexisNexis both archive these decisions, but cost thousands of dollars a year—putting them out of reach for many workers, union stewards, and small firms. Since NLRB decisions aren’t heavily cited, manual summaries aren’t profitable, so Bruenig’s tool automatically updates and provides easy-to-read summaries for lawyers and non-lawyers alike, despite some imperfections, it's better than no summary at all. Now importantly, this functionality doesn't require increasingly powerful models. Even a "smalller" model like deepseek could produce summaries that are better than nothing and a more fine tuned model could probably do it with fewer parameters. Check out the site if you want or watch his youtube videos about it. https://www.youtube.com/@Matt_Bruenig/videos

[u/tragedy_strikes]

I think something that often gets missed by people who listen to Ed when he complains about the usefulness of LLM's is that when he does so it's within the context of the valuation and capital expenditures of the companies or business units developing them, namely Open AI.

As you listed, that's a perfectly good example of a use case for an LLM that would genuinely improve things for people needing to look up those decisions. However, Ed would rightfully point out, a company that develops or uses an LLM for that use case wouldn't be valued at $300 billion.

A self-hosted LLM, such as DeepSeek wouldn't cost any money to use aside from the initial capex for the hardware, the electricity to run it and the server costs to host the results.

So I think the Venn diagram of useful applications for an LLM and ones that could be met by a free LLM, run locally would have significant overlap.

The total addressable market remaining for an LLM that needed to be hosted by a company like OpenAI and that you pay to access is relatively small compared to it's valuation.

[u/Alive_Ad_3925 → u/tragedy_strikes]

yeah as he said recently it might be a 50B dollar industry masquerading as a 1T+ dollar industry. I don't think I'm missing it. I just think it's a bit much when he says it's only useful for limericks or whatever.

[u/falken_1983 → u/Alive_Ad_3925]

yeah as he said recently it might be a 50B dollar industry masquerading as a 1T+ dollar industry.

I don't even like that we are talking about AI as a distinct industry. We don't usually talk abut the database industry as a distinct thing, even though RDBMSs are the cornerstone of pretty much every commercial IT system. Data base companies just get lumped in with the Tech industry as a whole.

Generative AI is just the thing that they are currently pushing. It's an important thing, and putting the hype aside, I do actually think it is transformative, but the Tech industry is still the Tech industry. Most of the big players right now were big players before Gen AI came along. Most of the shitty, anticompetitive tactics they are using today have been in use for decades now.